Show HN: Bookvine.io – Help find age appropriate books for kids aged 6 to 14
bookvine.ioHi HN, Bookvine.io helps find age appropriate books for kids, with links to get it from Amazon or your local county library (limited to US for now). This was created by my 13yr old son who is an avid reader. I used to spend hours trying to get the right books for him to read and then get it from local county library or Amazon. He wanted to create this site from the books that he has read - to help others in a similar situation. He used Webflow to create the site (I am a software engineer and guided him thru the process and some custom JS coding that was required) More about the story in the About Page. We would love some feedback or suggestions, to help improve the website. (there are no ads/no sign up/no monetary benefit etc) There are almost 300 books, along with reviews and recommendations - categorised by age - to make it easier for parents and kids to pick the next book to read easily.
He's doing a fantastic job! I haven't started going through the list yet, but the categories providing a competence description are a godsend for parents of kids who are ahead or behind of their age bracket. Well done to him!
This is fantastic. Thanks so much to your son for curating this list and creating the site. We will start working our way through these recommendations.
Thanks please do share any feedback as you work thru this - both on the content and also on the site as well.
Great patenting, kudos.
This is a difficult problem to solve for some kids, because there are at least two dimensions to consider:
- language difficulty (which is what lexile aims to measure)
- how appropriate the topic is
My 5.5yo son is decoding words at about 4th grade level (based on an informal 'San Diego Quick Assessment'). But he's limited in his reading by:
- his life experience and existing knowledge, which both affect comprehension
- his willingness to read books that have few pictures (he doesn't like books that have 10 pages between pictures)
It's hard to find books that are age-appropriate (based on topic and maybe format) but also have challenging language (vocabulary, grammar).
Totally agree. My boys are reading at an extremely high level. I wish sites like these were a grid of topical and reading level.
The same goes for the inverse. It can be discouraging for kids behind in reading to be assigned content based on their age (or grade) only for it to be far too challenging.
It’s a hard problem though because categorization makes it easy to organize content and find what you’re looking for, but it can also feel like a competition, which is not always helpful.
I wonder if the solution is _not_ naming the categories...simply ordering them by difficulty...
Yes, that is definitely a good way to represent. Instead of age group based recommendation...we simply call it Phase 3, Phase 4 etc...
The elementary school our kid goes to seems to use this rating system: https://www.readinga-z.com/books/leveled-books/
Each grade level has 4 "levels". But each kid is on their own track. And while those books have assigned grades, the teacher assigns a pool of books for each kid based upon their actual reading level. And each week, the kids are supposed to pick 4 books from their pool to take home and read.
My daughter is in 1st grade and every week picks 4 "R/S" books (3rd grade). She has a friend that still picks books in the "D/E" category (late kindergarten/early 1st grade).
That's similar to what I recall from school myself, 20+ years ago. Iirc ours was based on colours, which was a nice dual because as you got more advanced the colour names themselves progressed from easy primary colours to secondary, tertiary - nicher vocabulary for the colour names before you'd even opened the book.
Thanks for sharing it. Will definitely check it out.
Is that using Lexile to do that?
Looking up Lexile, it seems to be different from it, although you can probably cross correlate books to some extent.
Love how you guys thought it out!
A few you might check out:
The Humphrey the hamster series
The Zoey and Sassafras series
The Secret Explorers series
Alice in Wonderland
Some Beverly Cleary books
Many of the DK nonfiction books
Thanks for the suggestions. Will definitely ask my son to check it out and then add it.
Diane Stanley
And, Terry Pratchett: Wee Free Men
Of course all the rest of Terry Pratchett is there to grow into.
Totally agree with you on all the points. As with most recommendations - YMMV.
This is just to provide a guideline/reference. The way I recommend seeing this list is - say your kid likes "The Penderwicks" then..."hey are few other books that are similar to The Penderwicks"
Yes, definitely. I hope my comment didn't come across as criticism! I love seeing sites like your kid's.
I was more lamenting the general difficulty of the problem. (And possibly just the lack of books that are suitable for kids who are advanced at reading, but have interests similar to other kids their age.)
Not taking it as criticism. I totally agree with you. I think as a parent of these advanced kids it puts more onus on the parent and kid to work together to identify appropriate books based on these reference points.
> how appropriate the topic is
I don't think this is a big deal, as IME kids don't find age inappropriate titles interesting enough to read. My wife is an elementary librarian and kids in grade 4 or less just don't like YA aimed at the 12+ crowd.
Yes, that’s the problem. The books for his age are too simple. Most books at his reading level don’t interest him.
I always found it interesting how different books for teenagers were from movies considered appropriate for the same age group.
For example, the "Cherub" series by Robert Muchamore, which I greatly enjoyed as a kid, included crime, drug and alcohol use (even by kids), sex scenes, mentions of underage prostitution and human trafficking, and even a scene of an attempted rape on a minor. The much more popular "Hunger Games" series was a little bit less violent, but not by much. Nobody seemed to mind. Those books were clearly intended for teenagers, I'd say 12-16 year olds, and there were no disclaimers about what those books contained.
Even with TV, things aren't as obvious as they seem. Over here in Poland, very few parents care about age restrictions. Unlike English, we don't even have a word for "explicit content". Creating online accounts with fake dates of birth is pretty much normal. When I was in middle school, most people I knew watched porn with very few difficulties. Game stores don't have any obligations to restrict what kids can buy, it's not even clear if refusing a game sale based solely on the age of the buyer is legal[1]. When one game store refused to sell GTA5 to a kid, I heard about it on the news. When I compare people of my generation raised in Poland to our American peers, where explicit content is much more of a taboo, I see no noticeable effects of watching such content.
This has some disturbing censorship implications, how many real-life phenomena are filmmakers omitting to get just a little bit more viewers, just because of some well-intended laws that seem to have no actual positive effect on society?
[1] Polish https://bezprawnik.pl/sprzedaz-dziecku-gry-dla-doroslych/
I would like to see the teens break out of the sameness of all the books in the young adult market and read more "adult" books. By adult, I mean some of the less cookie cutter book history has to offer. Yes, I realize there are formulaic books for adults as well, but the young adult market takes it to another level.
I could also live with no more stories about saving society or the world and how it happens to have fallen about a teenager where they aren't sure what looks best to wear and can't decide between several people as a romantic partner among those who are helping them along their quest.
Well done, this is great. I’ve already sent my wife a link to it. We are mostly through the original magic treehouse series and we need a new book series to read to our 4 year old. Amazon search is a wasteland for this sort of thing.
Let’s talk SEO. You need pages like this:
books-for-6-year-olds
books-for-7-year-olds
Etc
We have a site crontab.guru and you would not believe the traffic we get on our “every n minutes” pages. Long tail!
One more.. in your book pages I would change /series/ to /review/
Thanks a lot for the feedback and suggestions. Hope you find the site it useful. Totally agree with you, SEO is definitely an area to focus on so we can get organic search traffic.
btw - good fun series to pick up post Magic treehouse would be - Press Start, geronimo stilton/Thea stilton and Dogman to name a few.
Haha I love crontab.guru! It fits perfectly for me who uses cron schedules only 1-2 times a year, just infrequently enough to forget the format before needing it again.
Another good resource -- https://hub.lexile.com/
FYI: Just noticed a small mistake. "The Call of the Wild" attributed to George Orwell when it should be Jack London.
Also, my kid is really enjoying the Dragon Masters series right now, seems good for the younger readers just getting interested in chapter books.
+1 for the Dragon Master series. Also we're currently reading the Ninja Kid series.
Thanks for putting together the site, it's amazing that your son read 300 books already.
Suitability of books is a complex topic, but the site is a good start.
Typo: Animal Farm is by George Orwell (= Eric Blair), not by Jack London as the site says.
Great catch. Thanks for checking it out and the feedback. Will fix it. Yes I agree there is never a one size fits all.
When I grew up, there were great children picture books in China like these: https://m.sohu.com/picture/259669024
These books have great pencil drawings and text paragraph under each picture. They are not like Japanese cartoons which have almost no text. Their drawings are also not cartoonish.
Come to the US, I couldn’t find anything similar. There’s no new publication of these kind of books in China either.
They look wonderful. There should be digitization efforts to preserve some of these.
Thank you for this.
Suggestion: I'm looking at the 10-14 list. When I click "Next Page", it retains the "book series" section on top and the actual next page I have to scroll halfway down the screen to see. I'm not expecting to have to skip over the book series section again to get to the next page of individual books. Difficult and confusing, at best.
Thanks for checking it out and the feedback. Yes, pagination is confusing will pass on the feedback to my son.
Thanks! Just get to know the "Press Start" series from your website and my 6-year-old son will definitely love it!
This is a great list, though our 6 year old has brought about half of the age appropriate stuff home from the school library already.
Need to look at the other half. :-)
Love it. School and county/city libraries are great under utilized resources. That is one of the reason we put the library links directly as well. During COVID my son used a ton of the ebook lending from our local County library.
Fantastic, bookmarked. I would love to see book suggestions for younger kids too